major treatment

Asian financial crisis

...as a currency crisis when Bangkok unpegged the Thai baht from the U.S. dollar, setting off a series of currency devaluations and massive flights of capital. In the first six months, the value of the Indonesian rupiah was down by 80 percent, the Thai baht by more than 50 percent, the South Korean won by nearly 50 percent, and the Malaysian ringgit by 45 percent. Collectively, the economies most...

international relations

Australia

...affairs between 1951 and 1960 was Richard Gardiner Casey. He was unique among Australians in his experience of traditional diplomacy, yet he was ready and able to come to terms with the new Asia. As Indonesia became an ever more populous, and sometimes assertive, nation, there was wariness in Australia, but the fall of Sukarno in 1966 helped stabilize relations for many years. The grant of...

...and the South Pacific. While this stance was appropriate to Australia’s geopolitical reality, it entailed problems. Malaysia had long scorned Australia’s claims to empathy with Asia. Relations with Indonesia fluctuated and were never so tense as in 1999–2000, when Australia abandoned its earlier (and much-criticized) acceptance of the absorption of East Timor within Indonesia and led the...

Bandung Conference

a meeting of Asian and African states—organized by Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, and Pakistan—which took place April 18–24, 1955, in Bandung, Indonesia. In all, 29 countries representing more than half the world’s population sent delegates.

Cold War

To the south and east of the Asian mainland lay the vast, populous archipelago of Indonesia, where another romantic revolutionary, Sukarno, had played host to the Bandung Conference of 1955. Like Nasser, Nehru, and Mao, he ruled his 100,000,000 people by vague, hortatory slogans that added up to a personal ideology with nationalist and Communist overtones. The Kennedy administration had tried...

Japan

...displacing British, Dutch, and French colonial rulers as well as the Americans in Guam and the Philippines. The Japanese had to allow some margin of freedom to their satellite regimes in Burma and Indonesia in both of which preexisting local parties proved capable of creating sovereign states after the war. On August 17, 1945, Sukarno declared Indonesia independent. Indonesia had had a long...

Linggadjati Agreement

treaty between the Dutch and the Republic of Indonesia drafted on Nov. 15, 1946, at Linggadjati (now Linggajati) near Cheribon (now Cirebon, formerly Tjirebon, western Java). Soon after the capitulation of the Japanese in World War II, the independence of the Republic of Indonesia was declared, on Aug. 17, 1945, by the Indonesian nationalists. The Dutch attempted to restore their rule in...

Netherlands

...ending of hostilities between Turkey and Iraq in 1925, between Greece and Bulgaria in 1925, between Peru and Colombia in 1933, between Greece and its neighbours in 1947, between the Netherlands and Indonesia in 1947, between India and Pakistan in 1948, between Israel and its neighbours in 1949, between Israel, Great Britain, France, and Egypt in 1956, and between Israel, Jordan, and Egypt in...

...unity (the Common Market; later the European Community within the European Union); however, its influence was limited, even though it joined with Belgium and Luxembourg in a closer union (Benelux). Indonesia, where Dutch authority was reestablished after wartime occupation by Japanese forces, soon became the scene of a nationalist revolution. After some hesitation as well as bitterness, the...

Sutardjo Petition

request presented in July 1936 in the Volksraad (People’s Council) of the Dutch East Indies by a moderate Indonesian nationalist, Sutardjo; it urged the Dutch government to discuss self-government for Indonesia within the existing Dutch constitutional framework. The petition was regarded as too soft by the radical Indonesian nationalists and too radical by Dutch rightists. The Volksraad...

new religious movements

In Indonesia in 1933, the Sufi Muhammad Subuh, also known as Bapak, founded Subud, a movement that spread to the West in the 1950s. Its followers believe they can open themselves to the power of God through singing, dancing, shouting, laughter, and feelings of rapture and release. Thus, in form, at least, Subud parallels the traditional Sufi mystical experience and the charismatic Christian...

Volksraad

advisory body created by the Dutch in the East Indies (now Indonesia) in 1917 and opened in May 1918. It served as a forum for the expression of grievances but lacked the power to pursue genuine reform.